Paris

Category

Home visit

This afternoon, at the invitation of Her Excellency Caroline Bilkey, the New Zealand Ambassador to France, we visited the New Zealand Embassy in Paris. It was a real pleasure to meet members of the embassy team. We talked about Katherine Mansfield’s time in Menton, Paris and Fontainebleau-Avon, and about our own explorations of these places since our arrival in Menton in September. The conversation made me reflect on the extraordinary richness of our experiences in France so far, and how this...

Happy Birthday KM

It’s Katherine Mansfield’s birthday – the 135th turn of the sun since her birth in Wellington on 14 October 1888. On this date in 1922 KM  was in Paris, where for some months she’d been entrusting her health to a doctor who was offering a ‘revolutionary’ treatment for tuberculosis. The treatment involved repeated irradiation of the spleen and, despite clear signs to the contrary, Dr Manoukhin was optimistic that he would cure Mansfield by Christmas. Mansfield really wanted to believe...